It feels like just yesterday the entire world was buzzing about one thing & one thing only: OpenAI & ChatGPT. They were the undisputed kings of the AI world. But lately, I've been hearing more & more chatter, seeing more posts, & talking to more developers who are making a switch. There's a new name on everyone's lips: Anthropic.

So, what's the deal? Why are so many people, from individual users to large companies, starting to move from OpenAI to Anthropic? Honestly, it's not just one single thing. It's a combination of performance, a different philosophy, & a growing sense of trust. Let's get into it.

Here's the thing, when you build your workflows, your products, or even just your daily habits around a tool, you need to be able to rely on it. A recurring theme I've seen pop up in forums & discussions is a sense of unease with how OpenAI manages its model updates.

A pretty big stir was caused when OpenAI started deprecating older models that users had come to rely on. Imagine you've spent months perfecting prompts for GPT-4.5 for a specific writing task, & suddenly, it's considered "legacy" & on its way out. For businesses with annual subscriptions, this felt like a bait-and-switch. They paid for a certain capability, & it was being taken away with little warning. This kind of move makes people nervous. It creates a feeling that the rug could be pulled out from under them at any moment.

This is where Anthropic has been able to present itself as a more stable & trustworthy alternative. They're also a private company, but their founding story is rooted in a departure from OpenAI over directional differences, with a stated focus on the "responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity". That mission resonates with people who are starting to think more critically about the role of AI in our lives.

Beyond the high-level philosophical differences, there's something more immediate that users notice: the way Claude "talks." I've seen it described a bunch of times—Claude's prose is just better. It's more natural, less robotic, & it avoids those classic AI-generated phrases we've all become accustomed to, like "in today's ever-changing landscape" or "let's dive in."

For anyone using AI for creative work, writing, or even just drafting emails, this is a HUGE deal. Claude is often praised for being a better creative partner. It's been described as having a more "charming" personality & a more intuitive understanding of prompts, meaning you spend less time trying to trick the model into giving you what you want. Some users have even reported unexpected, human-like interactions, like an emoji being thrown in at just the right moment.

This isn't just a superficial preference. It points to a difference in how the models are trained & fine-tuned. Anthropic's focus on creating a "helpful, harmless, and honest" AI seems to have resulted in a model that's just more pleasant to interact with. It feels less like a machine you're operating & more like a collaborator.

For a long time, GPT-4 was the undisputed champion of performance. But that's not the case anymore. Anthropic's Claude 3 series, especially Opus & the newer Sonnet models, have been shown to outperform OpenAI's models, including GPT-4, in various benchmark tests. In fact, in some leaderboards that use crowdsourced human evaluations, Claude 3 Opus has even taken the top spot from GPT-4.

One of the most significant technical advantages for Anthropic has been its massive context window. For a while, Claude offered a 200k token context window, which was a game-changer for anyone working with large documents, long conversations, or complex codebases. It means you can feed the model an entire book or a dense legal document & it will remember the details from beginning to end. OpenAI has since caught up with larger context windows in its newer models, but Anthropic was a clear leader in this area for a long time.

On top of that, users have reported that Claude has amazing prompt adherence & instruction-following capabilities. It's particularly strong in coding, with some developers finding it to be a more helpful coding assistant than what OpenAI offers.

This is where the shift becomes REALLY apparent. According to a mid-2025 market update, Anthropic has actually surpassed OpenAI in enterprise usage. That's a massive deal. By the end of 2023, OpenAI held a commanding 50% of the enterprise LLM market. Now, Anthropic is the new leader with 32% market share, ahead of both OpenAI & Google.

Why the change? It seems enterprises switch models based on performance, not just price. And a key driver for Anthropic's growth has been code generation. Developers seem to be flocking to Claude, which has captured 42% of the market share for this use case, more than double what OpenAI holds.

This tells me a couple of things. First, professional users with specific, demanding tasks are finding Claude to be a superior tool. Second, Anthropic is successfully positioning itself as a reliable partner for businesses that need to build AI into their products & workflows.

For businesses looking to integrate AI for customer-facing applications, the choice of a foundational model is critical. This is where platforms like Arsturn come into play. A business could leverage the power of a model like Claude & use Arsturn to build a no-code AI chatbot trained on their own data. This would allow them to provide the kind of instant, nuanced, & helpful customer support that today's users expect, 24/7. The natural conversational abilities of a model like Claude, combined with the ease of implementation of a platform like Arsturn, can be a potent combination for boosting customer engagement & providing personalized experiences.

Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI researchers with a heavy focus on AI safety. They're a public-benefit corporation, & their whole deal is about building AI systems that are "reliable, interpretable, and steerable." This isn't just marketing fluff; it's a core part of their research. They've developed something called "Constitutional AI," which is a framework to ensure their models align with ethical standards & avoid harmful outputs.

This focus on safety & interpretability is becoming increasingly important. As businesses integrate AI into more critical functions, they need to be able to trust that the AI won't generate inappropriate, unethical, or just plain wrong information. Anthropic's claim that their models are less prone to "hallucinations" (making up facts) is a major selling point for anyone who needs their AI to be accurate & reliable.

Anthropic has also been praised for its open research, publishing detailed papers on things like mechanistic interpretability. This is the nitty-gritty work of trying to understand how the models are "thinking." For the AI community, this kind of transparency builds a lot of goodwill & trust.

Not at all. Let's be real, OpenAI is still a juggernaut. They have incredible brand recognition, a massive user base, & their models are still EXTREMELY powerful. GPT-5, for example, brought significant leaps in reasoning & speed. Plus, OpenAI offers a broader suite of products, including the image generation model DALL-E, which Anthropic doesn't have a direct competitor for.

ChatGPT also has features like the ability to build your own custom chatbot & an ecosystem of integrations that many users find valuable. The choice between the two often comes down to the specific use case. If you need a versatile, all-in-one AI toolkit with powerful image generation, OpenAI is still a fantastic option.

But the competitive landscape has fundamentally changed. It's no longer a one-horse race. Anthropic has emerged as a serious contender with a compelling alternative. They offer top-tier performance, a more natural user experience, & a philosophical approach centered on safety & reliability that many users find appealing. The rise of Anthropic is ultimately a good thing for everyone. It pushes the entire field forward, forcing companies to innovate, listen to their users, & think more deeply about the kind of AI they're building.

For businesses, the competition means more choice. It means you can select an AI model that truly aligns with your needs & values. Whether you're building a customer service solution with a platform like Arsturn, which helps businesses create custom AI chatbots for instant support, or developing a complex new application, you now have multiple top-tier options to power your creations. This competition ensures that companies will have to keep improving, & that's a win for all of us.

Hope this was helpful in breaking down what's been happening in the AI space. It's a fast-moving world, but it's pretty cool to see it evolving. Let me know what you think